Maxtor Shared Storage II

Advantages: Fast, quiet, Plug and Play
Disadvantages: Supplied 'back-up' software could be better.

...on the desktop. At this point the drive can be reformatted using Disk Utility (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility). Its worth mentioning that the drive can be used PC formatted under OSX (although it won't give maximum performance), but if you wish to share it with a PC, this might be useful. BACKING UP For very simple storage, copy files and folders to the Maxtor and nothing else is required. If your needs are more demanding, back-up software is supplied, or if you search the Downloads section at the Apple site, simpler alternatives are available - some Freeware. Personally, I found the supplied back-up software unnecessarily complicated and don't use it, but it's worth trying before exploring another route, if for no other reason than you've paid for it and your opinion may differ. There is also the Maxtor's One Touch method, where a button can... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, huge capacity, reliable, well built, quiet, good compromise between speed and price
Disadvantages: Relatively expensive, not the biggest or fastest

...as the cache is used for the most often accessed files. The bigger, the better. This 200GB Maxline Plus II has a very high density of storage -more data fits on the disk per inch of magnetic medium inside. This will hopefully help the drive to attain high levels of performance since more data can be read per spin. ***Edit.: One feature I should probably emphasise is the fact that this drive uses fluid dynamic bearings. I understand that this might be knew to some people and just another piece of jargon which they are bombarded with by marketing, but it is important. It simply means that the bearings for the spindles have a special type of seating in the drive. A fluid dynamic bearing (FDB in TLA marketing speak), is a thin layer of oil or other lubricant injected between the shaft and sleeve of a spindle. The bearing uses a rotating shaft... Read review

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Advantages: One touch backups, transfereable from computer to computer, more reliable than tapes
Disadvantages: bulky, installing on non-Windows XP computers, takes a long time to backup

...Upon hearing the familar metal-on-metal grinding noise from inside the computer's cases, meaning one thing, you're hard drive is going to die very soon. Luckly, the good people at Maxtor have given us the 'Once touch external hard disk'. The device itself is a self contained 300 GB 7200 RPM Maxtor Hard drive with a USB 2.0 ( 480 Mbs) or Firewire (400 Mbs) interface although the maxium data transfer speeds are 41 MB/s for the Firewire version and 34 MB/s for USB. Personally I think that 300 GB is a bit excessive for home computer purposes, and I would recommend the smaller 200 GB version availible. For office, work , and corperate use it is ideal. I now recommend the use of this device as a direct replacement for tape drives, when it comes to backing up servers. The 'One touch backup feature' makes backing up important data so much... Read review

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